


Two way stretch.

by redundant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (vaguely) - Freeform, Christmas, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 10:59:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18314087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redundant/pseuds/redundant
Summary: “You’re sexy,” Sirius says.Somewhere in the universe now, a record scratches.“What?” says Remus.“You have a certain bookish charm, is all I’m saying,” Sirius says, making a mental note to castrate himself later..sirius is bad at talking.(look this was fun to write and i hope you have fun reading it)





	Two way stretch.

“Why are we here?” Remus asks.

It is almost Christmas. The sky is a deep blue, the air crisp and cold, and the snow pure as the driven- damn. That doesn’t really work. In any case, it’s a lovely winter’s day outside: the key word here being _outside_ , which is where Sirius and Remus are not. Inside, here, in the Tower, it is somehow both stuffy and freezing. Remus sits on the windowsill, looking a bit like a lost bird with his large nose and red jumper. Sirius is sitting on his four-poster, which is littered with various things, some of which may at this point be alive. He doesn’t really want to check. His hands are folded in his lap; he tries not to twist them together too much. Again, key word: _tries_. This is not an easy conversation to start.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” Sirius asks slightly desperately. It’s not great, but it’s not the worst thing he could have said, either.

Remus blinks. “If you’re trying to tell me something, here-”

“No, no,” Sirius rushes to say. “I mean- yes, I am, trying to tell you something, but no. Not that.”

“Then what?”

“I just wanted to catch up,” Sirius says. “It’s been a while.”

There is a weighted pause, and then Remus says, “We live together.”

“Yeah, but I like talking to you,” Sirius says. “With you. I like you. I mean, as a friend.” Sirius feels he’s losing track of this conversation somewhat, and tries to wrestle it back. “We’re friends,” he clarifies.

“I should hope so,” Remus says. “It’s been six years.”

It has, at that. “You can never be sure,” Sirius says with a sage sort of smile, though he’s aware that, in all honesty, it probably looks like he’s got a touch of indigestion. It feels like it. So he does what he always does when he feels, perish the thought, _insecure_ : he starts to talk. “I once knew a man- more of a boy, really- who I was friends with, or thought I was, at the time. And we were close. Like brothers, some would say, if Regulus wasn’t the world’s biggest twit and I didn’t fundamentally dislike him as a person. If it weren’t for that, we would be close as brothers. And he’d been mooning over this girl since we were, what, eleven, and then he went and bloody told me that actually, if it came down to it, if we were in a life-or-death situation-”

Remus sighs. “Can you hurry this up?”

“If we were on a cliff, or something,” Sirius continues, “and our wands were missing and there was only one rope, if you catch my drift, he would-”

“Was it James?” Remus interrupts.

Sirius tries not to feel hurt. “Was it James,” he scoffs. “I have other friends too, you know. Who says it’s him?”

“Well, was it?”

A pause. “Yeah,” Sirius says. And Remus nods like _there we go_. It’s insufferable. It grates against his very soul like the rustiest of kitchen implements. Sirius wants to kiss him. “I hate you,” he says instead. “Have you no appreciation for a story well told?”

“Yes, Pads, but this is a conversation. Where people talk like people and not books.”

Point, Sirius concedes, quietly, in his head, where he’s pretty sure Remus can’t hear him. He really, really hopes Remus can’t hear him, because, of late, a lot of the thoughts clanging around his skull have started to become loudly, definitively, terrifyingly explicit. Not to mention embarrassing. Really, _really_ embarrassing. Even by his standards. And that embarrassment begins the steady climb up his neck onto his face, as he desperately tries not to think about it, which of course ensures it’s the only thing in his mind.

“Who else would it have been?” Remus is saying. “Also, I was there for that conversation.”

His words are like a life preserver in a whirlpool of paranoia; Sirius latches on to them, white-knuckled and grateful. “No, you weren’t.”

“Yes, I was.”

“You weren’t.”

“I was.”

“You weren’t,” Sirius insists, as the life preserver begins to slip out of his grasp. “I would have noticed.”

Remus smiles shortly. “Well, you didn’t.”

“That’s not possible,” Sirius says, and then, shifting tack from contradiction to ad hominem: “You’re too quiet for your own good, Moony, that’s what I’ve always said.”

“You say a lot of things.”

“I do,” Sirius agrees happily. “And you love it.” A thought, impossible and frightening, rises to the surface as cheerfully as a corpse in a lake. “You do, don’t you?”

Remus makes a face and shrugs like _eh_. “Not when you talk for an hour about a conversation I was there for.”

That one, admittedly, stings. “Don’t sugarcoat,” Sirius mutters.

There’s silence for a bit. A long bit. Long enough that it may not even be able to be called, by definition, a _bit_ , but some extended agony of the soul, a silence that is sat in as one would sit in damp socks, or an itchy jumper: unhappily. Sirius sort of fidgets with the hem of his shirt, vaguely hating himself, until Remus asks:

“So, what were you going to tell me?”

in a quiet kind of uncomfortable, half-laughing way, and shit, Sirius really does hate himself, just a bit. He used to be better at this having conversations shtick. He used to be a lot of things, including

a good brother,

human 100% of the time,

not non-platonically attracted to one of his best friends, for a given value of _non-platonic_ and _attracted_.

It’s weird. It’s really bloody weird, and he doesn’t know what to do with all of this feeling: hold it, maybe, in his arms like a pile of fresh laundry he doesn’t know how to iron or fold. And it’s inconvenient because he doesn’t want to shove his bloody wrinkled clothes onto Remus. Remus is too nice for that. Remus is too close to him for that. But his arms are getting tired and this analogy is getting ridiculously long, and he does what he always does when he doesn’t want to think: he talks.

“You,” Sirius begins, “are everything to me.”

“Oh, God,” Remus says.

“You are the air I breathe, and the flowers in the springtime, and the moon when it’s full and bright.”

“Stop.”

“You are,” Sirius continues, raising his voice, “the stars in the sky-”

“Shut up.”

“-and the fire in my loins-”

“I don’t _want_ to be in your loins-”

“-and the sparkle in my eye. You are the McGonagall to my Dumbledore and the Mrs. Norris to my Filch. And Moony, if I am Vanessa, you’re my Archie and my Becky,” he finishes proudly, and looks up.

Remus is frowning. It isn’t your typical, garden-variety Remus frown, which is lofty and long-suffering and only really there out of an unspoken obligation to conform to a certain role within the group (i.e. Bookish Nerd Who Wouldn’t Know A Good Time If It Bit Him On The Arse, Because Of The Stick Currently Shoved Up Said Arse). No, this frown is different. It’s genuinely confused.

“What?” says Remus of the genuinely confused frown.

“You’re my Archie and my Becky,” Sirius repeats.

“I’m not deaf, I heard you the first time. What are you on about?”

“Is it not,” Sirius starts, faltering under the headlights of Remus’ gaze. “The, um. Those Muggle comics, the ones McKinnon gets owled in. You’ve read them. I know you have. I saw you the other day.”

“Sirius-”

“I did.” Sirius is on firmer ground now, and presses on bravely. “I know I did. You were sitting there in the common room, in that bloody desk chair of yours, and everyone thought you were doing your Arithmancy homework, except you bloody weren’t and I know it because you had one of those comics shoved in your textbook, you-”

“Sirius,” Remus says firmly, and Sirius shuts up. “Her name isn’t Becky.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It really isn’t.”

“What is it, then?”

“Betty. Betty Cooper.”

Sirius blinks, genuinely appalled. “That’s a shit name. What is she, a housewife?”

“I’d like to see you come up with a better one,” Remus says, an edge to his voice.

Sirius leans forward and narrows his eyes and says, with force and deliberation, “Becky.”

They’re very close, now.

And they remain there, in a moment that seems to be blown of clear glass, lit by the slanting light of a darkening sky through the tower window; and Sirius is tongue-tied, frozen, a living cliche. There’s just his heartbeat and his breath and Remus, who’s looking right at him. _Do it_ , says something.

Then Remus licks his lips and moves back, and the moment shatters neatly along with Sirius’ hopes and dreams for the past four months. He coughs, sort of, trying to cover it up. “Beatrice Cooper,” he says weakly.

“Hm?” Remus sounds distant.

“Beatrice. Elizabeth. Betty. Whatever.”

“Oh. Yes.” Remus sort of hesitates, and then adds, “Also, Vanessa isn’t Vanessa. She’s Veronica.”

“Oh,” Sirius says, and then, defensively: “It’s a stupid name anyway.”

“So’s Sirius.”

“So’s Remus.”

Remus nods at this. “Two for two on that one for me, I think,” he says. “Remus Lupin. I think my parents might have hated me.”

“Remus _John_ Lupin,” Sirius offers. There’s something inside him that feels, quite strongly, that he should be standing on quicksand, and the fact that he’s not is throwing him off a bit. It’s weird. “A good, solid, English middle name, John. Reliable. Sturdy.”

“That’s me,” Remus says, looking down at his folded hands. There’s a hint of a smile around his mouth, but like most of his smiles these days, it’s a bit sad and soft. “Reliable and sturdy.”

“Those aren’t bad things,” Sirius says, gentler than usual.

Remus glances up briefly. “No, they’re not.”

“You’re right they’re bloody not,” Sirius insists. He realises he doesn’t know why or what he’s arguing.

A half-shrug; the smile becomes crooked. “Not the sexiest adjectives, though.”

“You’re sexy,” Sirius says.

There’s a record player in the common room below them; Caradoc Dearborn had put it there after he’d got it one Christmas, and it just sort of stayed there. And James had been messing around with it, in the way every pureblood kid messed around with Muggle stuff when they got their hands on it, and halfway through _Something_ (which is an excellent song, Sirius has to admit), the record had scratched and the song had wound to a painful stop.

Somewhere in the universe now, a record scratches.

“What?” says Remus.

“You have a certain bookish charm, is all I’m saying,” Sirius says, making a mental note to castrate himself later. “You know. Like a- what’s the word. A sexy nurse. Or a sexy librarian.”

Remus is a man of many frowns, and he is sporting yet another one. This one is your classic Remus _I’m surrounded by idiots_ frown, with a hint of _I’m getting a headache_ , offset slightly by the interesting way the corner of his mouth is twitching. “First of all, nurses don’t have bookish charm.”

“Sure they do.”

“They really don’t.”

“I’m sure some of them do.”

“I’m sure some of them do, too, but not to the extent that they’re a defining quality for nurses everywhere.”

“Piss off,” Sirius says.

“I’m right,” Remus says serenely. “And second-“

“I get it, I get it, you’re the unsexiest person to have ever walked the face of the Earth-“

“Second,” Remus continues, “what the hell is this sexy librarian thing? The only librarian you know is Pince.”

A mental image of something Sirius refuses to name surfaces from the depths of his mind, and he shivers. By the look on Remus’ face, he’s experiencing a similar thought, too. “Let’s move on,” Sirius says quickly.

“To what?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“Well, neither do I. I just-“

“Stop thinking about it,” Remus interrupts, “please.”

“It has feathers,” Sirius moans.

“I didn’t need to know that.”

Sirius’ head is in his hands. “And leather and-”

“Please.”

“Merlin’s left testicle, Moony, I can’t.”

“That’s your own problem, then.”

“I’m not going to suffer alone.”

“Go find someone else to suffer with,” Remus says.

“But I like making you suffer,” Sirius says, and smiles charmingly.

There’s a beat, and then Remus says, somewhat tiredly, “Yeah. You do.”

That doesn’t sound good.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Remus says, and it’s a lie as bald as Winston Churchill, who Sirius learned about in Muggle Studies and whom he would think of pretty highly if it weren’t for all the war-mongering, which he personally doesn’t really like. He doesn’t like this, either, Moony lying. He likes honest Moony. Moony who tells him to shut up and stop; Moony who is firm with him, who tells him to sod off if he needs space. He likes pushing and being pushed back.

“Tell me,” Sirius says.

“No,” Remus says.

“Tell meee,” Sirius sing-songs.

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

And while this verbal tennis is fascinating and stimulating and etc., Sirius feels he should move the conversation along somewhat. He makes a random stab at something that will elicit a response. “You’ve been acting weird,” he says, and hopes it has an effect.

Remus splutters like bacon in a pan. “ _I’ve_ been acting weird?” he says, incredulous. “If you want to see _weird_ , Sirius, go look in a bloody mirror.” _Effect achieved, then,_ Sirius thinks happily. “Surprised you haven’t done that in the last five minutes, by the way,” he adds viciously and- ouch. Alright. Sirius is significantly less happy. “I can’t believe you,” Remus continues, with no regard to the hurt pout currently forming on Sirius’ face. “You barely look me in the eye anymore. It’s ridiculous. You haven’t had a conversation with me that’s lasted longer than a minute without getting all weird or rushing off somewhere.”

Sirius had rolled the dice of fate and trusted them to lead this conversation somewhere interesting and sexy. Sirius had held the kite with the copper key in the middle of the storm, and tried not to mind the wet clothes. He had hung his hopes on this flagpole, worn his heart bright red on his sleeve- look, the point is, Sirius had made some decisions, and Sirius been wrong. “We’re talking now,” Sirius says weakly.

“Before today, then.”

“We’ve talked before today. Several times, in fact.”

Remus, that wet sandwich of a man, doesn’t appreciate Sirius’ wit. He looks him directly in the eyeballs and asks, “What’s going on with you, Pads?”

That’s the-

What’s that expression? It’s a slightly weird one, and Sirius read it somewhere once and- oh, yeah.

That’s the baby.

Not to say, of course, that Remus has just handed him a squalling newborn creature. Remus has handed him a different problem, which is a question Sirius can’t answer, because Sirius doesn’t, in fact, know what’s going on.

Or he knows some parts of it, like having half the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Enough to hazard a guess at the full picture, but not enough, for someone filled with an uncharacteristic amount of self-doubt and shame, to want to say it out loud, in case the lakeside house turns out to be a castle, or the rolling fields turn out to be a penis, or something.

And to take yet another shitty analogy and drag it out further, Sirius doesn’t go in for puzzles much. Oh, yes, it might seem like he does- and he has a reputation for being a smooth bastard who does not only puzzles but crosswords and sudoku, but really, no. None of it ever actually mattered to him. Not when he gets right down to it, when it’s late and James and Peter and Remus are long asleep, and it’s just him in the light of a careful lumos, thinking.

Because he likes Moony, and has done for a while now- as a strictly heterosexual, platonic-type friend. But in recent months, a few things have changed. The _heterosexual_ , for a start, was done away with on Valentine’s Day, when Remus had kissed James in drag full on the mouth at dinner, turned to a shocked table and a scandalized Sirius, calmly wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and said, “Now fuck off.” This had effectively ruined Sirius’ perfectly planned prank (to make Remus uncomfortable by sic-ing James on him, which he realises was a bit shitty), and also moved Moony up a few notches on Sirius’ respect scale- which was no easy feat, as he was already pretty high up.

But Sirius is

“I don’t know,” Sirius says lamely. Remus rolls his eyes, and he rushes to continue. “It’s been- I know I’ve been weird. And I’m-” he searches for the word- “sorry.”

“Wow,” Remus says.

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

“Shut up,” Sirius says without feeling, and flops back onto the bed.

He stares at the ceiling of the four-poster for a while; it’s a little splintered in places, and burned, and generally roughed up from misfired jinxes and hexes that bounced off mirrors. He hasn’t really looked at it before with much attention. It’s fascinating. He does not notice how, in a slow sort of way, Remus insinuates himself onto the bed next to him; he doesn’t notice how his steady warmth presses into Sirius, where he’s sort of touching Sirius’ knee and calf; he doesn’t notice the sharp curved lines of his silhouette in the lowering light of the window.

But gradually, that fades. He thinks about the first time he’d looked at Remus and something about the word _platonic_ had- not changed, maybe, but shifted slightly when he wasn’t looking.

They were at the Shack. It had been a warm, slow night; the air was heavy with stormclouds and no rain; it hummed with a buzzy sort of shiver; a full, obscured moon hung in the sky. And it was just before the Change, and Remus was thin and pale in the light of Sirius’ lumos, face turned to the side. Prongs and Wormtail had left to wait outside- Remus had asked them to go, and they had. Sirius could feel the dog itching to meet the wolf again but he stood there, patient, biding his time. And Remus had turned and looked-

He’d looked at Sirius, and he’d looked hungry.

It did something to him, then. It does something to him now. Something slides sweet and low and electric across his spine.

Sirius wonders what would’ve happened then, if he had- he doesn’t know. Done something.

Sirius wonders what’s happening now.

“What’s happening?” he asks Remus, who has been silent for far too long.

An exhale. “I don’t know,” Remus says. His words are short and clipped. “I keep thinking something’s happening and then it’s not.”

Sirius’ heart is racing, but he’s strangely calm. “What if I wanted something to happen?”

Remus shifts now to face him. He’s warm, where their knees are touching; he is quiet, when he speaks. “I’d ask.”

Sirius doesn’t breathe.

“But I think,” Remus says, soft and strained, “I might know.”

They’re almost there.

 _Almost_. Sirius doesn’t do almost. He does _extremely_ and _dangerously_ and _stupidly_ : never almost. It would seem that he’s starting a collection. A collection of unsure maybes and missed chances and, because there’s no point beating around the bush (ha!), moments of sexual frustration that erode him as water does dams. “Then do it,” Sirius says.

A beat. Silence stretched thin like violin strings, and then-

“I can’t.”

Sirius blinks.

Remus continues. “I want to hear you say it.”

“I,” Sirius says. “You.” _Fuck you_ , he thinks, and the words are vicious, empty, choking things. He might actually explode.

“Say it.”

“Stop bloody saying that,” Sirius hisses. Because what the hell is he supposed to say? _I hear guitars whenever we’re alone together_ , maybe. Or, _you make me feel like the sky_. Or, _your hair looks nice today_ , or, _I want to touch you_. He wouldn’t be caught dead- wait, actually, no, the only time he would be caught saying any greeting-card shite like that out loud would be if he were actually, verifiably dead, and even then, it’s a close thing. But Remus, infuriatingly, doesn’t say anything, just stays there, and everything just builds and builds- all these months of wanting and not having, of needing and not asking, of empty spaces that should have been filled- until something snaps.

“I want to kiss you,” Sirius says.

Silence.

One heartbeat, then two. Then three.

Sirius counts them slowly, double-checking that the world hasn’t just ended or the sky fallen on his head; it feels like it might have done and he just hasn’t noticed yet. Remus, the bastard, sits there like Patience on a monument, only without any of the virtue and all the martyrdom. “Then do it,” he says.

Sirius’ breath packs up and legs it. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

And there’s that ache again, in his chest, and it’s a hollow, keening thing: _I can’t lose you_ , it says. _You mean too much to me_. “We’re friends,” Sirius says instead. His voice cracks, just a bit.

Remus’ voice, for his part, is gentle and low. “Friends kiss sometimes,” he says, and moves closer.

“Yes.”

Remus’ hand is on Sirius’ knee. “We’re friends.”

“We’ve established that.”

Remus’ hand is moving up. “Yes, we have.”

“Yes,” Sirius agrees, and then, slightly more breathless, “ah. Hah,” because Remus’ hand is doing warm, distracting, friendly things to his inner thigh. “Tease.”

And in one fluid motion, Remus presses forward like a tide up sand and is on top of Sirius with a hand in his hair. “Idiot,” comes Remus’ curt reply, breath hot on his jaw; “moron,” he says over the pulse in Sirius’ neck. His lips drag there. “Talk all the time but you never say a fucking word.”

“Yeah,” Sirius agrees, his eyes already sliding shut. “Why don’t you, ah.” Words are slow, slurred, meaningless things here. They float dizzily into the open air and spiral out to the stars; Remus’ touch holds him down and sends him spinning, makes him solid and makes him light up like a Christmas tree, and nobody’s shirt is even off. Remus may have been Patience, but he sure as hell isn’t Chastity now. “Make me,” Sirius says nonsensically.

“Shut up,” Remus says, and kisses him on the mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=invybO6nErU)
> 
> this was completely unbeta'd and also i didn't Scrutinise it before posting. as such, pls let me know if you find any typos/errors/weird unfinished sentences.  
> hit me with those kudos and comments for that sweet sweet serotonin rush!  
> have a good day etc


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